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Ocean Energy: Products and Pollutants (2017-2018)

Background

As technological developments have better enabled us to understand and exploit ocean common-pool resources, the ocean’s economic potential will continue to be harnessed in new ways to meet demands for energy (offshore oil and gas, methane hydrates and alternative wind, tide, wave sources), food security (aquaculture, fisheries), minerals (deep sea mining), pharmaceuticals and other emerging needs.

Oceans also represent a significantly less visible, highly interconnected and more difficult environment to manage than most terrestrial systems. Ocean energy entails significant risks, the most visible of which is the risk of oil spills either from production or from transportation of crude oil in ocean settings, but including lesser known threats such as noise pollution that results from various industrial processes involved in producing ocean energy.

Ocean energy is, indeed, a much larger and more complex topic than just oil spills. The surge in ocean renewable energy technologies, including algae biofuels, and newfound hydrocarbon reserves make this issue an emerging one that also has a significant history.

Project Description

This Bass Connections project team will focus on the products (e.g., energy from multiple sources) as well as pollutants (e.g., ocean noise, altered seascapes) resulting from ocean energy development.

Team members will analyze the values, judgments and preferences inherent in competing visions for management and governance of ocean energy resources and how to manage the products and pollutants. Through team discussions and activities, individual research and writing and interaction with classmates, instructors and collaborators, team members will assess the consequences of human decisions of current ocean energy issues including:

Deep-sea mining

Traditional oil/gas development

Renewable energy sources and engineering new technologies

Governance of “high-seas” ocean energy resources.

Ocean waves represent an enormous source of energy that could be tapped to power long-range buoys in remote ocean locations. The engineering component of this project will involve designing, building and testing an ocean energy harvesting buoy. Potential implications from this work include the ability to expand the operational life of buoys indefinitely as the need to replace batteries will become unnecessary. The potential to create mesh networks of wireless sensing data buoys, then, could serve multiple purposes. Monitoring marine mammal migratory patterns, seismic activity, meteorological phenomenon and navigational aids are among the many application areas that already exist.

The goals of the applications portion of the project involve exploring the energy response of a standard ocean buoy based on its geometry (e.g. size, shape, center of mass) in an aquatic environment (e.g. wave tank tests and ocean tests at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort). Tested devices will be deployed at the Duke Marine Lab.